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should lead us to overleap. It is true, no doubt, that Criminal Law cannot permeate the moral relations of mankind, being too gross an instru- mentality; for criminal tribunals are not com- petent to investigate moral offences and adjudicate upon them, when the nature of the offence is such that the essence and degree of its turpitude cannot

be duly brought out in evidence. But it does not follow that there should be no moral heart in the administration of criminal justice, or in the penal legislation by which it is to be guided. On the contrary, there is nothing more important than that penal legislation and the moral heart of mankind should be in the most intimate com- munion, each supporting and reacting upon the other. And a law taking a distinction where there is no moral difference, and where no question of incompetency to investigate arises, seems to be at variance with those principles of moral retri- bution which it should be one great object of Criminal Law to support and cherish in the minds of the people.

But it will be said that in order to the com- munion the sentiment must be reciprocal, and that if the popular mind takes a distinction where there is no difference, the law must do likewise. I think, however, the necessity of making legislation and practice bend to public feeling is sometimes too hastily and indiscriminately assumed. It is, of course, highly important that public feeling and law should work together, and it is when they do work together

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that both crime itself and the germs of crime and criminal tendencies will be most effectually repressed; and any severity of the law which stands in marked opposition to public feeling will defeat its own end, inasmuch as juries will refuse to convict, and sometimes even judges will evade the duty which the law lays upon them. But it does not follow that the law is to be absolutely servile to the public sentiment, where that sentiment is unduly indulgent to crime. The law will lift the public mind no little way, provided it be not itself pitched too high. When public feeling is widely at variance with a just moral standard and with public interests, the law should not conform strictly to either, but by a mediatory operation draw them together. And the law may safely assume to teach the public mind, when, as in the case of attempts to murder, the reason of the case is plain, and the error of the public mind, if indeed

any such error exists, is mainly that of a

dull moral sensibility which requires to have a dead man before its eyes in order to feel that the full moral guilt of murder has been incurred.

At all events, it cannot be necessary that any case of an unrelenting attempt to commit murder (duly defined murder) which is accidentally defeated, should be placed upon the same footing as the numerous cases of dishonesty for which imprisonment for two years is awarded, and not imprisonment only, but imprisonment with hard labour.

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